The Anabaptist community in early America created and used devotionals with bookbinding features not commonly seen outside that community. This talk will explore those structural and decorative binding features, while placing these devotionals in a context of European Swiss Anabaptist books, and touching on the ways Anabaptists used devotionals in their community life.
Click here to book the online lecture.
Presenters:
Alexander L. Ames
Alexander L. Ames is Director of Outreach & Engagement at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, where he oversees the Rosenbach’s exhibitions, historic house tours, as well as online and in-person public programs. He holds an M.A. in American material culture from the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware (where he studied book history under his thesis adviser Consuela Metzger), and a Ph.D. in history and museum studies from the University of Delaware. He is the author of The Word in the Wilderness: Popular Piety and the Manuscript Arts in Early Pennsylvania (Penn State Press, 2020).
Erin Hammeke
Erin Hammeke is a Senior Conservator for Special Collections at Duke University Libraries. She received her MSLIS and Certificate of Advanced Study in the Conservation of Library and Archives Materials from the Kilgarlin Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She also earned a BA in Art History and Fine Art with an emphasis on sculpture and metalsmithing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Erin did her graduate internship in rare book conservation at the Weissman Preservation Center at Harvard University and has also held positions and internships in conservation at the Pinos y Serriera Archives, Vilassar de Dalt, Spain; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Consuela (Chela) Metzger
Chela Metzger is currently working as Head, UCLA Library Preservation & Conservation Center. She is a book conservator, bookbinder, librarian, and occasional bookbinding historian, with long term interests in the histories of bound record-keeping structures. She fell in love with Anabaptist Devotionals while living in the Delaware Valley and being exposed to Anabaptist books and Anabaptist history in America and Europe.
Muddy Creek Farm Library, 296 Wheat Ridge Dr, Ephrata, PA 17522, U.S.A.